Diary of an Arcade Employee

What Sells Video Games? Mimes of Course.

Its a good thing the Vic 20 was so awesome that the game sold themselves. Because as spokesthings go, the Mime is somewhere below rapping shoe insert. I see absolutely no reason for UMI (which made some decent games) to use this mime, none of the games in the ad are clown related that I can see and this ad was out well after the Shields and Yarnell craze. Its a real head-scratcher.

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3 thoughts on “What Sells Video Games? Mimes of Course.”

It’s funny… you could give me a C-64 disc, and I’d crack that sucker within minutes. Simple disc redirection routines. Give me a HES or UMI tape on the VIC-20, and I could never figure out how they stopped you from copying them at that time. Even using a dual cassette deck didn’t work.

I learned later that they had written BASIC programs that self-deleted specific POKEs in the program using early-loaded routines, then replaced it with other code (usually a REM), and some self-modifying assembly code to show where this routine loaded in memory. Pretty tricky stuff, but it worked. Dual cassette decks didn’t work due to data degradation in the second generation copy. Digitizing cassettes these days is trivial as long as the tape isn’t too degraded.